Think-Tanks Join to Urge New York State Legislature to Hold Fair Hearings

National Center for Public Policy Research, Heartland Institute Urge New York Legislature to Hear Witnesses from BOTH Sides at e-Cigarette Hearing

e-Cigarettes are a Gateway Out of Tobacco Smoking for Many Adults, Groups Say

Washington DC/Chicago, IL – Today, the Health Committee of the New York Senate will hold what it is calling a “public hearing” on a number of bills relating to electronic cigarettes. Among the bills to be heard are a ban on electronic cigarette use wherever combustible cigarettes are prohibited and a ban on the sale of the liquid used in many electronic cigarette products.

While the public is welcome to watch the hearing, New York citizens and public health experts who support electronic cigarettes as alternatives to smoking are not welcome to actually speak.

“I would have liked to have traveled to Albany to give testimony, as I’ve done in Los Angeles and New York City,” said Jeff A. Stier, Senior Fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research. “Unfortunately, the hearing notice on the New York legislature’s website makes clear that oral testimony was ‘by invitation only.'”

Added Stier, “Predictably, New York Senate Health Committee Chairman Kemp Hannon only invited one side of the public health debate on e-cigarettes — those who believe nanny state laws are always the solution to health issues.”

Stier’s isn’t the only voice that New York Senators won’t get to hear at the “public hearing.”

Gregory Conley, Research Fellow at the Heartland Institute and an ex-smoker who quit with the aid of electronic cigarettes, said, “It is disheartening that the New York Senate Health Committee will not hear from a single public health advocate who believes that electronic cigarettes are and will continue to be a gateway out of smoking for millions of adults.”

It wasn’t that Stier or Conley weren’t seeking to testify: “I made multiple attempts to be added to the agenda, but was denied by Senator Hannon’s office,” Conley said.

Especially irking to the pair is the fact that lobbyists from the American Lung Association and American Heart Association were among those fortunate enough to be invited to speak. “From 2009 to 2011, the American Lung Association and American Heart Association both campaigned in the New York state legislature for a total ban on the sale of electronic cigarettes to adults. They should have no credibility on this issue,” said Conley.

Non thinking Americans, the majority, probably think this is a good idea. After all, fair is a four letter word that means about the same as the other four letter word.

The fear here is that the FEC, i.e. the media…i.e. CIA/CFR….i.e. Black Pope, cannot run the risk that an overpowering and under regulated Internet would expose and/or disrupt their corrupt election and campaign dog and pony shows in which they have successfully convinced the brain dead, non thinking Americans that our election process is “fair” (damn, there’s that word again) and honest.

It is the Council on Foreign Relations who decides who will be president and what you and I think about that matters little. The media orchestrates the entire campaign, under the direction of the CFR and CIA. I believe that the FEC (wink), the media (wink, wink), the CFR (wink, wink, wink) and CIA (wink, wink, wink, wink) have had a few too many “interesting” things happen via the utilization of a powerful and instantaneous, relatively free (by today’s standards) Internet. They simply cannot run the risk of not being able to place their puppet in the White House. Therefore, the need for more Internet regulation.

Last week, the National Marine Fisheries Service announced its intention to grant a petition to regulate Lolita — an orca whale that has lived at Miami’s Seaquarium for more than 40 years — under the Endangered Species Act. As PLF’s Liberty Blog previously reported, PETA petitioned to have Lolita regulated under the act with a rather bizarre argument applying the species-wide standards for listing to a single animal. The Service ignored the substance of the petition, instead treating it as a challenge to whether it could exclude captive members of a species from the listing of a species as a whole. This is part of a broader policy to bring captive species within the ambit of the act. Last year, the Fish and Wildlife Service announced that captive chimpanzees and exotic species grown on private ranches would be regulated under the act, both of which the Service had previously expressly exempted from regulation.<<<Read More>>>

“When these standards are fully implemented, EPA estimates that for every dollar spent to comply with these standards, the American public will see between $118 and $267 in health benefits,” it said. “Consumers will also see a monetary benefit from efficiency improvements in the new wood stoves, which use less wood to heat homes. The total health and economic benefits of the proposed standards are estimated to be at $1.8 (billion) to $2.4 billion annually.”<<<Read More>>>

Remember, it is probably the same idiots who calculated how much money we were going to save with Obamacare that are crunching these fake numbers for us. Don’t be fooled. The goal here, by the Marxist/Communist United States Government, is to put a stop to wood burning for heat. It’s all about scarcity and human control.

New York, Los Angeles, Chicago Move to Restrict Devices that Help Smokers Quit

New York, NY – On the same day the Los Angeles City Council moved to regulate e-cigarettes, the National Center for Public Policy Research’s Jeff Stier testified at a New York City Council Health Committee hearing on a similar measure being rushed through the New York City Council.

In his testimony, the New York-based Stier, who heads the National Center’s Risk Analysis Division, encouraged council members to think twice about whether it is in fact “prudent” to extend New York City’s ban on smoking in public places to include e-cigarettes:

“I would caution you that this is not the prudent thing to do. The prudent thing to do here is to help cigarette smokers quit. Rushing to judgment here could have serious, unintended consequences that you need to be aware of. It will stop people from quitting smoking. E-cigarettes are not a gateway to smoking. The data does not show that. E-cigarettes are a gateway to quitting smoking.”

E-cigarettes, which do not produce smoke, have been a boon to those who have tried to quit smoking but have failed.

“Nicotine,” Stier explains, “is addictive, but not particularly harmful, especially at the levels consumed by smokers or users of e-cigarettes, who are called ‘vapers’ for the vapor, rather than smoke, emitted by e-cigarettes.”

“Nicotine’s bad reputation should be attributed to its most common delivery device, cigarettes,” says Stier. “Nicotine itself is about as dangerous as the caffeine in soda. Along the same lines, while too much soda can cause weight gain, nobody seriously suggests that caffeine causes obesity. Similarly, e-cigarettes provide the nicotine and the habitual activity of smoking, without the danger of burning tobacco.”

“Mayor Bloomberg and his nanny state allies in New York City and Los Angeles have steam coming out of their ears about e-cigarettes. Here is a product created by private-sector innovation that is doing what many hundreds of millions of dollars of government spending, costly litigation, addictive excise taxes, warning labels and punitive regulation have been unable to do: help cigarette smokers quit happily. ”

“Regulators understand that in order to maintain not only their huge budgets, but their basis for authority to control both private-sector businesses as well as personal decisions, they must demonize, delegitimize, and defeat e-cigarettes every step of the way,” Stier says.

“Some, without any basis in science, allege that e-cigarettes are a ‘gateway’ to smoking. But initial studies, as well as empirical evidence, show that e-cigarettes are a major gateway away from, not toward, smoking. For all the heated rhetoric, there’s little dispute in the scientific community: those who quit smoking cigarettes and switch to e-cigarettes reap immediate as well as long-term health benefits. And those improvements are dramatic.”

Stier concludes: “Regulations that treat e-cigarettes the same as their deadly predecessor will have the unintended consequence of keeping smokers smoking. Quitting nicotine use altogether is the best choice. But for those who chose not to, or find it too difficult, e-cigarettes are a potentially life-saving alternative.”

Outgoing New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, nicknamed “Nanny Bloomberg” by many for his use of government tools to influence what private citizens eat and drink, supports the New York proposal. Bloomberg’s administration imposed New York City’s ban on public smoking in 2003.

Like Los Angeles and New York, Chicago is considering banning the use of smokeless e-cigarettes anywhere in the city tobacco smoking is banned. The proposed ban is supported by Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The sale of e-cigarettes to minors is already appropriately illegal under Illinois state law.

The National Center for Public Policy Research, founded in 1982, is a non-partisan, free-market, independent conservative think-tank. Ninety-four percent of its support comes from individuals, less than four percent from foundations, and less than two percent from corporations. It receives over 350,000 individual contributions a year from over 96,000 active recent contributors.

Washington, D.C. – New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration is now banning all food being offered to the city’s homeless shelters. New York City’s bureaucrats have become so singularly focused on what people eat, says the National Center for Public Policy Research, that they’ve lost their common sense.

“So much for serving the homeless: The Bloomberg administration is now taking the term ‘food police’ to new depths, blocking food donations to all government-run facilities that serve the city’s homeless,” writes Jeff Stier, director of the National Center for Public Policy Research’s Risk Analysis Division, in an op-ed in Monday’s New York Post.

“In conjunction with a mayoral task force and the Health Department, the Department of Homeless Services has recently started enforcing new nutritional rules for food served at city shelters. Since DHS can’t assess the nutritional content of donated food, shelters have to turn away good Samaritans,” writes Stier.

New York City DHS Commissioner Seth Diamond told the National Center’s Stier that the complete ban on food donations is consistent with Mayor Bloomberg’s emphasis on “improving nutrition for all New Yorkers.”

As Stier writes, “A new inter-agency document controls what can be served at facilities — dictating serving sizes as well as salt, fat and calorie contents, plus fiber minimums and condiment recommendations.”

“Diamond insists that the institutional vendors hired by the shelters serve food that meets the rules but also tastes good; it just isn’t too salty, ” writes Stier. “So, according to the commissioner, the homeless really don’t need any donated food.”

Stier’s research reveals that there’s more to the story.

“For over a decade, Glenn Richter and his wife Lenore have led a team of food-delivery volunteers from Ohab Zedek, the Upper West Side orthodox congregation. They’ve brought freshly cooked, nutrient-rich surplus foods from synagogue events to homeless facilities in the neighborhood,” explains Stier. ” The practice of donating such surplus food to homeless shelters is common among houses of worship in the city,” he writes in the op-ed.

Mr. Richter’s experience suggests Commissioner Diamond and the Bloomberg administration are out of touch.

“[Glenn Richter] says the beneficiaries — many of them senior citizens recovering from drug and alcohol abuse — have always been appreciative of the treats he and other OZ members bring. It’s not just that the donations offer an enjoyable addition to the ‘official’ low-salt fare; knowing that the food comes from volunteers and from community members warms their hearts, not just their stomachs,” writes Stier.

“So you can imagine Richter’s consternation last month when employees at a local shelter turned away food he brought from a bar-mitzvah,” says Stier in the piece.

Richter, Stier writes, “is a former city Housing Authority employee, while his wife spent 35 years as a South Bronx public school teacher, so they’re no strangers to bureaucracy and poverty. But an exasperated Richter says, ‘this level of micromanagement is stunning.'”

The National Center for Public Policy Research, founded in 1982, is a non-partisan, free-market, independent conservative think-tank with over 100,000 recent supporters. Contributions to it are tax-deductible and greatly appreciated.

*Editor’s Note* The following is a press release sent out by the House Committee on Agriculture, chaired by Frank D. Lucas. I would like to point out that although this release and the information contained in it, seems directed mostly to problems with agriculture regulation and the Environmental Protection Agency, this calling of the Obama Administration’s “Sue and Settle Strategy” is very widespread and reaches every aspect of Americans’ lives.

WASHINGTON – This week during The Ag Minute, guest host Rep. Tom Rooney discusses the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) growing trend of developing public policy as the result of lawsuit settlements. This defective method of putting in place regulations that circumvent the public rulemaking process can negatively impact the agriculture community. Rep. Rooney highlights one such example with the proposed Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) Reporting Rule.
Click here to listen to The Ag Minute. The transcript is below.

“It seems agriculture can’t catch a break from the Obama administration’s regulatory overreach.
“The latest example has the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considering a new mandate that could compromise the safety and security of America’s livestock operations.

“The proposed mandate would require all Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, to submit to the EPA a long list of proprietary information regardless of whether or not they discharge manure. This information would be made public. If you don’t comply you would face fines up to $37,500 per day.

“The problem with this proposed mandate is two-fold:

“First, livestock producers are concerned the new regulation not only violates their privacy, but also poses significant security risks. Making extensive information public could put their families and operations in peril.

“Second, this mandate is part of an ongoing and alarming trend within the EPA where policy is increasingly being developed as the result of lawsuit settlements and not the rule of law.

“This particular proposed regulation was the result of a settlement with environmental groups, so the farmers and the ranchers that will be affected by this mandate had no say in this development.

“Using lawsuit settlements to create policy is an underhanded way of changing the rules on our farmers and ranchers without their voice and consideration.”

The Ag Minute is Chairman Lucas’s weekly radio address that is released from the House Agriculture Committee.